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Friday 22 August 2008

An attack on India’s future

The Indian government has a problem here, not unlike that facing Britain and the United States, in its dealings with Pakistan. Make too much of the ISI’s role in backing such groups and you risk destabilising the regime of General Pervaiz Musharraf, who was the target of a fundamentalist assassination attempt in 2003 and who performs the most perilous tightrope walk in international affairs.

India and Pakistan have been attempting a rapprochement for the past two years. They have talked about trade and water, they have restored long-lost transport links and eased visa restrictions. And they have played cricket in each other’s countries. These may seem like relatively small things until you consider the recent history.

This thaw in relations only came about because the countries went to the edge of war in 2001 after the fundamentalist attack on the Indian Parliament that killed nine people. For the first time in the long history of antagonism between the two states, there was the very real possibility of nuclear weapons being deployed. I was in Islamabad at the time and I remember the febrile atmosphere. Up at the Line of Control separating the two armies I saw hundreds of villagers fleeing in anticipation of war. As a diplomat later put it to me, ‘They looked into the abyss and very nearly tottered into it.’

The Americans estimated that a nuclear conflict between the two would kill 12 million people. Such an eventuality would have catastrophic consequences far beyond the borders of the subcontinent. There would be economic collapse and refugees in their millions. The last great taboo, one that has endured more or less unchallenged since the Cuban missile crisis, would have been broken.

This is the scale of the threat posed by fundamentalist violence in the region and a powerful reason for India and Pakistan to keep talking, whatever the provocations provided by groups like Lashkar. See it in this way and you understand why what has happened in Mumbai matters profoundly to us all.

More articles from: Fergal Keane | this section

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